I hated Pittsburgh my whole life. I longed for primary forests, sharper mountains and valleys marked only by waterways. I was desperate to escape steel mill smog and the clatter of industry for clean air and water in remote places. I never expected I would venture to such places when I began my PhD in environmental social science at Arizona State University in 2024. A year later, though, I found myself in Ecuadorian Amazon for six weeks, learning the Kichwa language from a local Kichwa community at the Iyarina Andes and Amazon Field School.
While sitting on the sandy banks of the Rio Napo, I realized that my hatred toward Pittsburgh wasn’t hatred at all. It was grief. Not for the Steel City eulogized fondly by older relatives — but for lifeways I never knew that connected to the land and each other before steel mills and coal mines.
I learned more than just the Kichwa language in the rainforest. Eerily reflected back to me in the waters of the Rio Napo were the narratives of extraction, grief and hope that I had become so familiar with, not in the Amazon rainforest, but back home in Pittsburgh.
Today’s Amazon is yesterday’s Appalachia
After buying a one-way ticket to Ecuador with only two weeks notice, I sifted through the Carnegie Library stacks. I was accosted by books recounting tales of explorers-gone-missing and ethnographies of indigenous peoples, all with pictures on the book jackets of many brown bodies punctuated by a central white one. There were accounts of the rubber boom, climate change, illegal gold mining, oil drilling, colonization, violence and social dissonance brought by a modernized world. There was no record, though, of Pittsburgh and the Napo River communities (known to the Kichwa as Napo Runa) shared stories: what it means to love and grieve a landscape shaped by extraction, and what it means to find hope in the face of climate change, staggering biodiversity loss and environmental degradation.
To turn back time in Appalachia is to witness the destruction of the Amazon rainforest now. There is one lone road that cuts through the forest, back to the larger town of Tena a half-hour away. The field school and community sit near the headwaters of the Rio Napo, a major tributary of the Amazon River. The Napo is the lifeblood for everything and everyone living along it. Many of the indigenous people in this part of Ecuador experienced their first contact with the industrialized world just over half a century ago. The matriarch of this community, Elodia, still speaks more Kichwa than Spanish, and remembers a whole life before roads and electricity, before mercury from an illegal gold mine made the river toxic to bathers and swimmers.
I am no stranger to dirty rivers. I lived for 23 years surrounded by three, all deriving their names from the Lenape and Seneca languages: the Monongahela, the Allegheny, the Ohio. Our rivers are too polluted to safely swim in and are often dotted with coal barges and tugboats.
The last uncontaminated river in the upper basin of the Ecuadorian Amazon flows into the Rio Napo, merging at a point in the town of Puerto Misahuallí. On warm and sunny days, you’ll see people swimming in the Rio Misahuallí, just behind the divide where its clear, slow waters meet the fast and murky Napo.
During one of my evening walks through Puerto Misahuallí’s tiny town square, I met Pepe Tapia, a Kichwa ethnobotanist and tour guide, covered in mud and with a machete strapped to his chest. Over the course of several weeks, Pepe brought me and another researcher into the forest, showing us which plants are edible, which are poisonous, and which can be used to treat or even cure various ailments. He quieted us to listen to poison dart frogs and endemic bird species. He also brought us onto the slice of land he owns called EcoSelva on the Rio Misahuallí, which he and his neighbors protect from logging and mining.
Lining dirt pathways, hundreds of trees are home to approximately 2,500 orchid specimens, representing nearly 200 species. Pepe rescued many of these orchids from logging sites cleared for mining. Nearby a netted enclosure full of butterflies that Pepe raises sits an expansive view of the river and surrounding hills. This place feels like an oasis or even a sanctuary, but the harms of industry show themselves on closer inspection.
I stood before that view of the river, watching blue-headed parrots feasting on flametree fruit, and pointed at a section of clear-cut forest on top of the hill across the river. I asked Pepe what it was. His answer sunk a familiar feeling into the pit of my stomach: a brand new illegal mining site. He said he’d watched countless times as mining companies rolled in with promises of money, education and jobs, only to buy up land from beneath indigenous Kichwa and Waorani feet. As in Appalachia, those promises of economic prosperity are so rarely fulfilled.
It’s a juxtaposition I’m all too familiar with: white-tailed deer using coal train tracks as their pathways through the Appalachian woods and slag heaps where old-growth forests used to be. Contaminated air and water, making swimming and fishing in our rivers dangerous and inflicting high asthma and cancer rates. Little did I know that to prepare for the Amazon, I should have been taking a good look at the steel mills and railroads snaking their way through the valleys of Southwestern Pennsylvania.
I had seldom experienced primary forest — there’s not much left in Appalachia. Primary forest in this section of the Amazon has become hard to come by, too. It takes seven hours by canoe after nearly two hours of driving down a dirt road to enter primary forest in Waorani territory. Blue-and-yellow macaws soar over the river and the place buzzes with life in a way that so few places on Earth do anymore. Our deafeningly loud motorized canoe snaked through forest with only occasional gaps in the treeline marked by thatched-roof houses. In front of these houses, there were almost always families waving at us from the banks of the river as we passed.
The Amazon rainforest is a behemoth of conservation and climate change messaging: the lungs of the world. The rainforest holds nearly 400 billion of the world’s trees (20% of the planet’s forest cover), roughly 25% of the world’s fresh water, and stores between 150 to 200 billion tons of carbon in the soil and vegetation. It remains home to an estimated 1.5 million indigenous people and 385 ethnic groups and tribes, including some of the few still evading contact with the modern world. It is also home to about a third of the world’s plant, animal and insect species, a large number of them not able to live anywhere else in the world. This span of land is the pinnacle of diversity and because of this, governments and nonprofits globally push to protect it.
From hatred to grief
In Ecuador, I focused on the smallest of points of connection and care: stepping over leaf cutter ants marching pieces of vegetation back to their colony, or watching Elodia painting intricate designs onto her pottery with brushes made from pieces of her own long, black hair. The scale of the surrounding forest never hit me; I was just another tiny creature fending off mosquitos beneath the canopy. Only after leaving Ecuador did I struggle with the enormity of it all: how much has already disappeared and how much more is at risk.
Grief is something many in my field struggle with. Being in environmental studies, we are somewhat like undertakers, watching extinction of species, landscapes and ecosystems. Frequently, we work with and in the communities with cultures, languages and lifeways that are embedded within those disappearing natural keystones. We usually are there in critical moments to witness this intense loss. This grief is reflected in newspaper headlines and in social media as the world grapples with a warming planet, and increased frustrations over environmental issues that feel too big to solve alone.
What rarely gets talked about is what lifts us out of this grief. In my case, it was how differently the Kichwa define their relationship with what we call “nature” that undid my hatred of the polluted landscapes I grew up in. The Kichwa language has no word for “nature,” as they have never been separate enough from it to need one. More importantly, rooted in the language is a social code of connection — llackichina — that every being, human or otherwise, is obligated to another. It is a deep and profound noticing and stewardship of place, community and culture, inseparable from the land we live on, water we drink, air we breathe. It was these tender moments of llackichina that I brought with me back to Pittsburgh.
I learned to camp, fish and forage on the Youghiogheny River (the name from Lenape), along the Great Allegheny Passage, a bike path from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland, that used to be a railroad. Coal towns and creeks colored by various mineral runoff served as our landmarks. The sound of the coal train from Connellsville (the “Coal and Coke Capital of the World”) on the other side of the river sliced through blue light, robin song and the early morning chill. Those places, the ones we Pittsburghers and Southwestern Pennsylvanians call home, are no less “natural” than the rainforests of South America, and are no less deserving of love.
If those moments of llackichina can coexist with downriver illegal gold mining, they can exist in Pittsburgh after centuries of environmental degradation and resource extraction. Even if we live right over coal seams and breathe in steel mill smog, that does not separate us from nature — nor does it exempt us from the obligation we have to connect with and care for our land, people and places. We will never get back our primary forests, but steel, coal and extraction are not our only inheritances. We can go beyond just hoping for a better future for our “nature” by practicing the type of obligation and deep connection to a place that exists in the Amazon.
Returning to Pittsburgh, I didn’t feel the old hatred. In its place was something subtler: tension between pride and loss, belonging and extraction, grief and grit. There is no divide to bridge between nature and society, not in the Amazon and not here. We simply need to practice the kinship that’s always been there.
Dalia Maeroff is an environmental social science PhD student at Arizona University and can be reached at dmaeroff@asu.edu.
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